When people say something is “Lynchian,” they usually mean that it’s uncanny or almost imperceptibly off. Or they mean something pure and lovely and innocent, presented in a frame that makes you sense the unseen insects crawling over one another, just below the surface. As you have no doubt noticed, a lot of art and a discomfiting percentage of current events meet this description. It’s a useful term, which is why it’s overused. Yet it rarely evokes the odd sentimentality at the heart of David Lynch’s films. Think of how the sinister drones of “Laura Palmer’s Theme,” from Twin Peaks, are suddenly overwhelmed by a brightly sad piano sequence meant to reflect the real pain hidden within surreal events. Should you need a reminder, Chicago post-punk standard-bearers Ganser drop those dire chords directly into “Black Sand,” the first song on Animal Hospital. Their bare-faced homage risks being predictable simply because it’s so obvious. But with its remarkably dense noise perfumed by an atmosphere of weird tenderness, Animal Hospital pays off the gamble. If you’re too cool to appreciate a Twin Peaks reference in 2025, wait until you hear what they think about you not dancing at shows.
Animal Hospital comes five years after the release of Ganser’s last album, Just Look at That Sky. In that time, they’ve steadily built a reputation as one of Chicago’s most intriguing indie-rock bands, touring with Idles and the reunited Mclusky, opening for Bikini Kill and Gilla Band, and working with Liars’ Angus Andrew on 2023’s Nothing You Do Matters EP. Andrew returns for Animal Hospital, but Nadia Garofalo, who used to front the band alongside singer and bassist Alicia Gaines, doesn’t. In her place is Sophie Sputnik, who fills the gap seamlessly—that’s her singing in “Black Sand,” sounding like she’s been in the band for years. Maybe it’s the result of a new member, maybe it’s the inevitable progress that comes with five years of steady writing and touring, but Animal Hospital feels like a refreshed and reenergized version of a sound that hadn’t yet lost its potency. It’s a tangled nest of wiry, traditional post-punk made messier by the band’s obsession with noise and tertiary effects, and dynamized by frequent detours into something resembling pitch-black cabaret.
Gaines has always tended to write Ganser’s airier music. With more space, you can feel the crushed velvet texture of her voice more directly, and she takes advantage of it throughout Animal Hospital. She croons her way through “Speaking of the future,” a scratched and silky Bond theme. Sophistication and glamor are a crucial aspect of Ganser’s appeal, as is the subversion of both; rather than pout over some romantic heartache, Gaines sings about the unbearable velocity of time as it barrels forward, while she and her band carve out a little temporary bunker of a song that slinks forward like Portishead’s “Sour Times.” “Everything that we think we know is wrong,” she sings in “stripe”—which, sure, is a nice, if banal, reminder we could all use from time to time—before the pendulum swings and she adds, “Everything that we think we know is right.” There’s a dreamy sway to the way the song treats this chorus, as if it’s trying to get comfortable reconciling its two seemingly incongruent truths.
This straightforward and stylish mode of handling paradox is underscored by the sense of awe that accompanies so much of the music here. In the case of “stripe,” with its cowbell and Vaselined synths that make it sound like a goth Deee-Lite, there’s a dark but sincere sweetness to the music that, in this context, does feel Lynchian. The song’s sentimentality is directed at something like the unknowable nature of truth, or maybe the naivete of thinking you might one day solve the riddle, which is an oddly existential sentimentality, but a real one nonetheless; who hasn’t found themselves lost in the beauty of not knowing?
Too heady? No problem. Gaines quotes a Michael Jordan meme in “Discount Diamonds”: “Fuck them kids,” she sings, smirking that they “don’t dance anymore.” Should the ire of MJ not convince you to shake it, Ganser figure, perhaps the classics will. “Mr. Plato says ‘Come on, let’s dance,’” Sputnik spits in the very next song. There is room here to go nuts over the real Mr. Plato’s writing about dance as the ultimate art form, should you want to—but don’t be a nerd, Ganser seem to say, put your ass into it. Besides, there are plenty of post-punk bands out there who want you to nod approvingly at their cogent class analysis or cower at their fearsomeness. You don’t need to know that Ganser are making smart music in order to enjoy moving your body to it, which seems like the point.
As with Andrews’ productions on Nothing You Do Matters, the feel of Animal Hospital frequently recalls the industrial dub of Adrian Sherwood. There are a million guitars corkscrewing through “Black Sand,” enough spooky background effects in “Grounding Exercises” to soundtrack a Hanna-Barbera Halloween episode. Even the rattling forward attack of “Half Plastic” is jammed with rapid breaths and photo-negative guitar shredding from Sputnik, Dove Hollis, and former band member Charlie Landsman. Taken as a whole, the density of sound makes Animal Hospital an unusually immersive listen. It’s the same way wandering through a well-orchestrated dream, or watching a beguiling TV show, can make you feel like you’ve stepped into another dimension, one that’s full of danger and joy and something else you can’t quite name.
